Last summer (2022) I biked from ~Berlin to Copenhagen with a friend. A week of gorgeous riding on pavement and some dirt, carrying all our gear but staying in hotels to avoid the need for camping equipment, through a mix of rural landscapes, quaint towns, and cities.

It started with flying into Berlin, checking my boxed bike and a lightweight duffel bag that just held two panniers of gear. I reassembled the bike in a train station in the city, hooked my panniers onto it, wadded up the duffel bag in the bottom of one of the panniers, and rode away…

There’s a recommended scenic bike route from Berlin -> Copenhagen, which partly follows the EuroVelo 7 route, with more useful detail including GPS tracks on the Komoot Berlin->Copenhagen page (I downloaded those and wrangled them into RideWithGPS on my phone, and onto a dedicated GPS bike computer I was trying out for the first time).

There’s also great paper map book we used that highlights the route page by page (it’s in German only, but that doesn’t really matter for a map, and my friend spoke German). It’s available in your typical map stores in Germany but hard to find in the US– I ended up spending the extra money to mail order a copy from Stanfords UK ahead of time. I think it would be reasonable to do the entire ride just with this map book and no GPS, but we liked having both.

Overall, the paper map and the GPS route both seemed to match reality on the road 95% of the time, though we sometimes took alternate routes where something had changed, or we saw a physical bike route sign by the road that didn’t match our map, or we just saw an interesting dirt path to detour onto.

The road surfaces varied. Other than when we had to pass through cities, many of them were a mix of quiet country roads (good pavement, few cars), paved bike paths paralleling main roads (the last rainy image below is a typical two-lane bike path in the countryside of Denmark, as nice as the main road nearby), or gravel roads cutting through forests:

There were a handful of sections with more unusual surfaces, from dirt paths to cutting through a port to get to a ferry, all fun in their own ways:

We ate a lot of white asparagus, cheese, meats, and bread (many hotels had great good protein-heavy breakfasts, and in a handful of towns we rented an apartment and cooked):

And I’ll say again– it was beautiful. We were never deep in the wilderness, but we passed farm fields, historical castles, the chalk cliffs of Møns Klint, and more. I still think about this a year later.

Finally, a week and ~500km later, we rolled in to Copenhagen and parted ways (I then traveled on to the island of Bornholm for a more lazy vacation-with-occasional-cycling).

A few other highlight memories, the experiences you can’t plan but can happen when you explore:

  • Rain and chilly weather on one grey day– I wanted a break. We were out in a rural area, but I looked on google maps and saw a small cafe symbol in a nearby town. We had to explore a bit to find it– down by a harbor where nothing else seemed open. And… it was open, cozy, and full of cheerful people chatting, and we got amazing grilled cheese sandwiches while we took a break from the rain to warm up. (Hårbølle Havne Høker)
  • Biking past rolling rye fields on a windy day, their silvery ripples looking like ocean waves out of the corner of your eye.
  • Biking along the North Sea, coming to a dock jutting out into the water. Getting convinced to jump in the very cold ocean. And then getting ice cream afterwards (and there was a convenient public changing room with free hot showers nearby).
  • The best schnitzel and white asparagus of the trip with some house-made plum schnapps, in the unassuming tiny hotel restaurant in Bützow (I think it was the only hotel in town, the Hotel Bützower Hof).
  • Biking for an hour or two on a dirt road in a forest without seeing another living soul. Then coming across a tiny (abandoned?) baby bird crying in the middle of the road, and moving it off the road with a leaf. I know it probably didn’t make it, but we had to do something.

  • Seeing a sign for a mountain bike detour, and taking it (only had to walk one short section).
  • Stopping for a beer at tiny microbrewery cafe just off the ferry (Café Købmandsgården), and ending up chatting with the brewer for a while and getting to taste beers-in-progress in the Brite tanks.

A few notes on route and timing:

We debated how much time to set aside for this, and settled on a goal of ~60-105 km (40-65 miles) per day over the course of seven days. We felt we could ride it faster, but made a conscious decision to aim for this pace for a few reasons:

  • This is vacation. We want to be able to stop and spend plenty of time at historical sites and interesting cafes we came across without feeling hurried.
  • There were a handful of gravel and dirt alternate routes that I really wanted to ride, and knew would be slower.
  • There was the possibility of heavy rain part of the week, and the certainty of some intense headwinds– we wanted to leave open the option to skip a day of riding if the weather was terrible or at least make it a short day (we got fairly lucky on the rain and didn’t need to skip a day, but I’m glad we had the option).

To make that pace work with the time we both had available, we decided to take our bikes on a train an hour out of Berlin and start in Neustrelitz instead of Berlin itself. We’re both completionists by nature, so it was difficult at first to accept not riding the entire route… but I’m glad we made that call. When we got to the island of Møn we were blown away by the beauty and decided to spend a morning sightseeing around the island, and only got “back on the road” toward our next hotel around 3pm, so I’m glad we could make that a shorter riding day!

Weather:

We had some intense headwinds on one day, and for a few hours on two other days, but it wasn’t as frequent as we expected. And we got rained on lightly along the ride, but only really got soaked on our last day, in the final two hours before Copenhagen– the perfect time to be cold and wet and ready to sleep in…

Lodging:

We didn’t reserve anything before the trip. Instead, each evening we’d look at the maps and figure out where we wanted to get to the next day, then look online and make a reservation (mostly Booking.com, but sometimes it didn’t list relevant hotels so we had to do some google maps sleuthing + make some phone calls). I think one or two days we didn’t even do this until lunch the day of. Overall, this worked, and it was great to have the flexibility to adjust our plans each day… but the flip side of this is one day we had to push hard for a longer ride than intended to get to a town with a hotel, and another day we almost had to detour 10 miles off route to find one with availability (but it all worked out). If I did this again, I’d probably pre-reserve hotels for Fridays and Saturdays only, since there’s a lot of demand from local tourists going out to these scenic seaside towns (especially the isle of Mon).

But hey, without these constraints, we never would have ended up staying in some of the more unusual hotels, like Pension Elmehoj built in a converted retirees home, with bathrooms that look like this:

I also found this page in my notebook where, for fun, we ranked every hotel by a range of important criteria :)

Packing:

Generally, I traveled fairly light, with my bike plus two small panniers (10-15L each). At some point I’ll write up my packing lists from trips– every trip I learn more and refine it…

I rode with a hip pack on this trip for the first time. It felt so uncool (who cares) but carrying an extra 1.5L of water and my wallet/passport/snacks/rain jacket even when parking the bike and walking around was awfully convenient…

A few other lessons learned (or known and reinforced):

Looking back at a notebook I kept along the ride…

  • Get to major ferries early (perhaps by an hour?). We did some research and planned for this, and it’s good we did– just biking across the massive ferry terminal at Rostock took a while, and we had to buy tickets and get our bikes loaded.
  • I liked the combination of wool short sleeve t-shirt plus light UV-blocking sun sleeves (saves effort on sunscreen).
  • I’m glad I brought flip flops, to walk around the hotel or beach in.
  • Don’t make assumptions about other’s travel styles, it’s good to talk through what you each want out of a trip. For bike touring, I think the key points are (1) how early or late do you like to get up and roll out and (2) how much do you like to stop and detour along the way? (We traveled very well together, but it’s good we talked these through before the trip because one of us assumed much earlier morning starts than the other :)
  • I brought just two pairs of padded bike shorts to alternate between and washed the used pair each night in the hotel sink, hanging it up to dry. It would have been convenient to pack a third pair, as these didn’t always fully dry overnight and I had to figure out a way to clip them to my bike rack to dry during the day.
  • I should have bought chain lube– I left it at home because I wasn’t sure about flying with it, but even with our lightly misty rain I should have been lubing the chain every few days.
  • I didn’t like the screw-on-to-valve style of bike pump I brought– I accidentally unscrewed my valve cores (I didn’t realize I’d bought tubes with removable valve cores) which was… startling. And I didn’t have a good tool beyond my hand and a rag to tighten the valve cores in (edit: I’ve since bought a valve cap that doubles as a valve core tool such as the terribly named ‘Juicy Nipple’ for each of my bikes, so I always have one with me).
  • As usual, I brought rain pants and shoe covers but didn’t get a lot out of them. When it’s lightly raining, they just make me hot and sweaty and aren’t needed. When it’s raining harder, they only kept my feet dry for an hour or two– eventually the rain gets in. I may shift to just bringing a rain jacket and extra socks in the future.
  • Similarly, I often pack leg warmers and then don’t need them– I warm up quickly enough while I’m riding.

Edit: I also looked back at my notes a year later to think about why I enjoyed this trip even more than a usual bike tour, and my conclusions included:

  1. No car stress– 90% quiet roads or bike paths, not even riding by parked cars much
  2. Seeing so many other cyclists on these same roads and paths was good for my mood
  3. Riding in nature– woods, fields, water
  4. The idyllic landscape– almost every riding hour was beautiful
  5. Easy communication with people we met, between enough people speaking English in Denmark and my friend being able to speak German. Unexpected events like getting a personal tour of a microbrewery after chatting with the owner about beer styles wouldn’t happen without this, and that’s one of the things I regret most when I travel to countries where I don’t share a common language.
  6. The experience of riding on dirt and gravel in the woods (but well-packed, and with appropriately-wide tires), feels ‘more adventurous’ but in control
  7. I wrote down a note “80% effort, 200% fun”. It’s not that we were taking easy days– we spent most of each day in the saddle and my friend can really push. But still, I wasn’t riding as fast as possible, which made the endurance side of touring easier to deal with. Part of this was intentional via planning– intentionally planning this trip to take one more day than we knew we could do it in.
  8. Chill attitudes– as I mentioned, we had compatible travel styles, both OK stopping to look at some bird or sight, no major conflicts over decision-making, we both adapted to adversity (difficulty finding hotels one or two nights) well. I don’t think either of us complained during setbacks?
  9. Ate a good breakfast every day.
  10. I drank water often, never felt dehydrated. Simple but I don’t always do it (I’ve also found that drinking a lot of water in the evening helps even if I don’t feel thirsty).
  11. Taking the time for some scenic mini-stops or mini-detours (the cliffs at Mon, soft serve, a cozy cafe break from the rain). This ties into planning moderate-length days (once it’s the late afternoon, in the back of my mind I’m often calculating riding time left until it gets dark).
  12. Overall, comfortable hotels– hot shower, decent pillows, hearty breakfast each morning (I found myself preferring hotels to vacation rentals solely for the “hot breakfast provided” reason)
  13. Good weather (despite intense headwinds), not too hot or wet. After experiences in Utah + Cambodia I’ve realized that I find it much harder to handle riding in hot + sunny weather.